Denis Naughten (Roscommon-Galway, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister for taking on board amendment No. 7. This is very welcome legislation.

It will ensure for the first time ever we will have an effective sex offenders register in this country. To have an effective sex offenders register, the member of the force who will be monitoring a sex offender needs to be able to make contact with and interview him or her, take his or her fingerprints and photograph, and so forth. We will come to the photograph issue later and why it is so important to be able to take his or her photograph. The difficulty with the legislation as it was written and the argument I made on Committee Stage was that three days was not enough. This was even more so with the bizarre vote by Opposition Members on an earlier amendment, which concerned the issue of a high-risk sex offender who is released from prison and is residing in some rural part of the west being able to go to Wexford, Waterford or Cork, present there and he or she will have complied with the legislation. Having only three days for a member of An Garda Síochána in the west to go through the volume of notifications, identify that someone has moved to their area, and track him or her down and give that person notice to be fingerprinted and photographed was too tight a window. Seven days is a more responsible approach.

I thank the Minister for accepting the amendment, which will strengthen the overall thrust of the legislation and assist gardaí in managing high-risk offenders. While I know they make up a small proportion of the overall number of sex offenders, they pose a significant risk in the community and we need to give gardaí the tools to enforce the provisions.

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